Hi Henri and Everyone,
On 3/26/11, Laura Carlson <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Leif,
>
>>> Based on Lachlan's and Henri's feedback I deleted the sentence,
>>> "Conformance checkers should issue errors if the longdesc URL has
>>> certain file suffixes, such as .gif, .jpeg, .png etc.)",
>>
>> +1 This wasn't as simple as I must admit that I thought it to be.
>>
>>> I could put something like it back if people think it would be
>>> useful to have it as a warning. Do you think that the example
>>> spec text is better with or without it?
>>
>> Instead of suffixes, we could require the @longesc URL to point to a
>> #fragment ID.
>
> Thanks for your all of your input on this Leif.
>
> Henri, Lachlan, and Aryeh, if longdesc is reinstated into HTML do you
> think this would be a good idea?
I have been thinking about this a bit. Leif's idea does have merits.
The biggest one is that it would be a consistent rule for authors and
tools.
But only a very small portion of the longdesc use in the wild use
on-page anchors. We have just four examples out of all of them in the
research [1]. So it is not consistent in that respect. Existing
content correctly using longdesc without an #anchor would be invalid.
Here is an idea...maybe we could add something like "unless the
document contains an id that matches a longdesc attribute #anchor" to
the example spec text [2]?
So the spec text could read something like:
"Conformance checkers and authoring tools should inspect the URL and
issue a warning if they suspect that the description resource is
unlikely to contain a description of the image (i.e., if the URL is an
empty string, or points to the same URL as the src attribute unless
the document contains an id that matches a longdesc#anchor, or if it
is indicative of something other than a URL.)"
Henri, could that spec text work for conformance checking tools? Do
you think that requiring #anchor on all longdesc attributes would be
better?
Lachlan, and Aryeh what do you think?
Ideas for improving the spec text are greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Best Regards,
Laura
[1] http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#onpageanchor
[2] http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld-spec-text.html
--
Laura L. Carlson